Siang & Adi Belt · Eastern Himalaya & Brahmaputra Belt
People
| Name | Years | Field | Known for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mamang Dai | b. 1957 | Poet and novelist | From Pasighat, and the writer through whom Adi material — origin narrative, river, the moral weight of landscape — entered Indian English literature. The Legends of Pensam (2006) and The Black Hill (2014), which won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2017; Padma Shri in 2011; also the author of a working account of the state's food. |
| Talom Rukbo | 1937–2001 | Religious reformer | An Adi who set out to give Donyi-Polo a congregational form it had not previously had — a first dedicated worship space in 1968, the Donyi-Polo Yelam Kebang as a central body in 1986, standardised images in place of bamboo altars, and written prayer. The result is argued over: supporters see consolidation, critics see a shift towards Hindu organisational form. |
| Daying Ering | — | Public life | An Adi leader from the Siang who represented the frontier in Parliament in the decades after independence, at a time when almost no institutional channel existed between these villages and Delhi. The wildlife sanctuary on the braided Siang below Pasighat carries his name. |
| Lummer Dai | 1940–2002 | Novelist | One of the first novelists from Arunachal Pradesh, who wrote in Assamese rather than in Adi because that was the literary language available to him — a fact that says most of what needs saying about the hill-and-valley relationship in the mid-twentieth century. |
| Verrier Elwin | 1902–1964 | Anthropology and administration | Adviser for tribal affairs on the North-East Frontier and the person most responsible for the policy that kept outside settlement and missionary activity out of these valleys in the 1950s. His collections of Adi and neighbouring myth remain the largest published body of the material, and his approach has been criticised since as protective to the point of paternalism. |
| Moji Riba | — | Documentation and film | A Galo film-maker and researcher who founded a centre for cultural documentation in Arunachal and won a Rolex Award for Enterprise in 2008 for recording the state's oral traditions and ritual calendars while the last full practitioners were alive. |
People from Siang & Adi Belt who shaped its history, arts, science, sport and public life. (6)